Why fasting at Ramadan means more than this festive feasting

A CONVERSATION overheard at a bus stop outside a local secondary school in Ealing where I live:

Teacher to a young Asian boy: "So Samad, what are you getting for Christmas?"

Asian boy, obviously reluctant to talk: "Nothing Miss."

Teacher: "Nothing?"

Asian boy: "No. We don't have Christmas, Miss. We celebrate Eid. I am fasting, Miss."

Teacher: "Are you? Well, I don't know how you can do that. (Silly laugh) I could never function without my cups of tea and chocolate biscuits."

It was a perfectly innocuous conversation, I guess, yet I found it curiously disturbing. In its very ordinariness this exchange revealed the enormous chasms that still divide the various tribes that make up this nation. The teacher - like millions of other nice, polite, decent Britons - obviously has no idea that in the midst of what has become the most excessive Christmas ever, millions of their compatriots are going through Ramadan, the month when all Muslims learn the invaluable lessons of self-control and self-denial by going through the rigours of total fasting from sunrise to sunset.

If they are able and not ill, Muslim children as young as 10 will be participating in this ritual. They will have been anticipating that moment when they are allowed to join the world of serious grown-ups. They will find it hard - you are not allowed even a drop of water over daylight hours - but in all these years I have never met a single Muslim, young or old, who felt that this onerous obligation was anything other than uplifting.

Even this year, when we are being so manipulated by manufactured Millennium madness, when all our desires are being turned into commodities, British Muslims have managed, through the force of their faith, to remain calmly detached and to show up this crassness that has been allowed to demolish the original spirit of Christmas.

As a Muslim married to a Christian with a mixed-race daughter, I am finding it increasingly disheartening to see a society where the churches have emptied out and, instead, people talk vaguely about spirituality and surround themselves with scented candles and books of calm.

And maybe I am being more of a killjoy than I need to be, but the Dome - what I have seen of it - seems to encourage this idea of Britain as a mercilessly fun place with a corner set aside for some holy titbits.

The meaning of Ramadan in the midst of this feels even more real and intense, and it has been extraordinary waking up at five every morning, listening to our neighbours, the Khans who live upstairs, begin the fast by praying in the quiet of the dawn. At that moment, in spite of all the questions and anger at injustice one feels, I know that I have to believe there is still a God trying to guide us towards goodness.

There is much else that fasting brings to the fore. This month equalises the rich and the poor by reminding the former what it feels like to work on an empty stomach for hours on end. It is a test of how human beings can conquer base physical needs. And when the families break the fast at the end of the day, there is a collective appreciation of all of this and a genuine feeling of gratitude all round.

Ramadan even encourages brutes to tone down their brutishness and to try and be kind. And they do. When I was growing up in Kampala in Uganda, we lived next door to Mama Kuba (Big Mother), a terrifying Muslim matriarch who had shed four tremulous but adoring husbands, and who smoked 60 expensive cigarettes a day. She was enormous, with menacing, flappy arms and a sadistic need to thrash her servants, daughters-in-law (one of whom was eventually driven insane by the ceaseless abuse) and even her precious sons. But come Ramadan and Mama Kuba became an angel. Her voice turned soft and her words to petals.

She would buy clothes for her daughters-in-law. Beggars would be treated like gods and a whole line would appear outside her door. Jonas, with his debilitating elephantiasis, would lead blind Mirabu excitedly because they knew they would get food, money, kindness and their feet washed by a woman they otherwise feared and loathed. Of course Mama was being hypocritical, doing all this because she so wanted to go to Heaven. But her victims had at least one month of bliss in their miserable lives.

The festival of Eid, when it comes in early January, will not be replete with too many presents and objects. Of course, as we live in the West, our children are getting more spoilt, but on the whole, Muslim children expect new clothes, a little money, one or two gifts, wonderful food and much, much evidence of family love.

If I sound wistful as I write this, it is exactly how I feel, because I am now no longer as deep a part of that Islamic life, although I try my best to remain properly connected. Until 10 years ago, I fled this island every December to avoid the overbearing pressures of the festive season, which I felt belonged to someone else. I now do Christmas. We have a tree, which I love decorating. We will have turkey and trimmings (no pork, no lard, no bacon, and eaten after sunset) cooked by my husband.

My daughter was an angel in the school nativity play and, like other parents, I was quite weepy when she spoke clearly about the shepherd whose flock now spans the earth. Vera, my mother-in-law, from Shoreham-by-Sea and Jena, my own mother from Kampala, whose English is inventive and rudimentary, will carry on babbling away about the always-better past when people were not so consumed by consumption. And as long as there are no serious brawls between all of us gathered there, it will, God willing, be a happy few hours.

But unlike Eid, this will not be a time when collective faith is renewed. There will be too many goods exchanged. It will not feel like a deserved reward that has come at the end of a struggle and some pain. And this is what I will miss, even as I enjoy tearing into a turkey leg with my teeth and a large parcel with my greedy hands.